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As we await, debit cards and comfortable shoes at the ready, for the arrival in our metropolis of American shopping darlings like Target and Nordstrom - and we do - and as we flock to the shiny new Crate & Barrel at Oakridge, - and we are - there are also among us those who are quietly looking forward to the opening day of another U.S. shopping institution.

One whose arrival will likely be met with somewhat less fanfare and adoration.

That would be Walmart, the U.S. discount behemoth that has the effect of kryptonite on a conversation, especially in tony towns like Vancouver which has snottily resisted its affordable big box charms (slave labour! drives out small business! grossly overbuilt!) yet somehow reconciles its collective consumer snobbery while hitting the city's Home Depot and strolling the aisles of that other big boxer in town, The Bay.

So it will be a study in human shopping nature - not to mention elitist NIMBYism - should the rumoured British Columbia incursion of a new Walmart Urban 90 store comes to pass.

The "90" references 90,000 square feet, which is the Urban 90's much smaller footprint compared to its bulky 200,000-square-foot big sister. That downsizing affords the firm the opportunity to migrate to city cores, by building on smaller sites or moving into existing vacant properties.

It also, at least according to company bumpf, allows Walmart to respond directly to the community's immediate needs by tailoring the stock - from T-shirts to Tetra Brik juice boxes - for local needs and demand, a clever goal given the alphabet soup demographics of Metro Vancouver.

Walmart opened its first Canadian Urban 90 store in January 2012, in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough on a property that once housed a Zellers - buying the leasehold rights from Target, the new kid on the block that had acquired most Zellers locations from The Bay a few years back.

The move is a concerted about-face for a company universally damned for its behemoth one-stop shopping "supercentre" concept. But it is also part of an industry downsizing trend that has seen the opening in the U.S. of 10,000-square-foot Walmart Express stores, and Target's own smaller City Target stores in major cities like Chicago.

Big or small, the competitive retail wars in Canada have been heightened with Target's arrival, evidenced by Walmart Canada's recent announcement it plans to expand its national reach with a $450-million plan that will see a total of 388 stores in the country by January 2014. Those plans include an eye to the great white and woefully under-served north and to the urban centres where small is beautiful, further cementing Sam Walton's dream of delivering discount goods to the masses since opening his first store in Arkansas 50 years ago. So when is Metro getting a Walmart Urban 90?

Well, word on the street is that one is coming to Royal City Centre mall in suburban New Westminster.

As you might expect, official lips are sealed, so much so that a phone call to Laura Veevers, who speaks to the mall's leasing issues, elicited two "no comments" and one "look it up online" in response to questions asking if an Urban 90 was on the way, if the space had been leased and how much square footage was available. As for the mother corporation, several calls to Walmart Canada headquarters in Mississauga were not returned.

Meantime, the mystery of the maybe mall tenant has the burg buzzing, even though there is a big Walmart across the river in Queensborough, but mostly because a resident was quoted recently in the local paper about getting an email survey from Air Miles asking if he would shop at an "urban" Walmart at Royal City Centre.

The other clue?

The mall's still-vacated anchor space was formerly a Zellers.

New Westminster is a small, middle-class town, but it is still a growing urban enclave. It may not have the room or the appetite for a big box, at least on this side of the Fraser, but a small box? That might well be the perfect fit.

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